The Asus gets a facelift!

The Asus gets a facelift!
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

Thanks to some stickers and duct tape, yellow and pink day-glo colors: just the way i like things!

Silkscreening is rad.

Silkscreening is rad.
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

Over the weekend, Noah and I silkscreened some t-shirts. The gold bombers on royal blue are, of course, all his doing.

Chinese DNS error

(thx eli!)

Sunbathing for Christmas: I could get used to that...

So, I went to Haiti over the holiday. Vacation? Well, I guess a little bit. Otherwise, I was shooting pics and vids for Longchamp Charities, an amazing little 501(c)(3) founded by a great friend of mine, Marjorie Longchamp, and her best friend, Béatrice Brice. They operate on a very simple principle: Haitian children would have a much better chance at success if there was a way to eliminate the basic barriers to their advancement. It's hard for children to be children, and to grow into functional adults, if they are encumbered from the start by lack of food, shelter, and security. Longchamp Charities, or L'école de Mme. Bébé, as they say there, grants children with these very simple things, and all they ask for in return is that they go to school.

Some 70-odd kids live with Bébé on her sprawling property in Thomassin, Haiti, in what looks like, to me, some post-civilization Carthaginian neverland. It's beautiful. And although it recalled the most exciting of my Lord of the Flies fantasies, there was very rigid structure to the kids' days and nights. Schooling plays a central role there; kids will stay up till past midnight studying if they have not learned their lessons fully, even on Christmas. They drill eachother when they're bored on multiplication tables and French grammar, in preparation for any of Bébé's feared drills.

Of course, I had my reservations about going to Haiti in the first place. I heard many horror stories about what happens to people in Haiti, both from the "media", and from my hosts themselves. Bébé herself, was kidnapped 2 years ago, and shot in the liver. She was stuck in a traffic jam, at a somewhat reasonable hour in the day, in a very busy intersection. They pointed a machine gun at her head, and forced her out of her car. Three hours later, she was found lying in the street three blocks from the site of her abduction, and people just stepped over her body as she lie bleeding. Her life was saved, but she still bears a nasty scar, and is incredibly prone to infection. I asked her if she'd ever buy a gun to protect herself, and her children. She said no, because she doesn't want God to ever question her faith in Him. As you can probably surmise, Bébé is a force to be reckoned with.

My trip was, above all, eye-opening. I could write pages and pages about my time there, but I don't believe that would do it justice, and nor do I want to cast any sort of mystery over the land, its people, or my time there. I'm just lucky I got to see it. I took about a gazillion pics and vids while there, and it's all up on my flickr account. Here's a guide to the photo sets I made:

L'école de Mme. Bébé

This set contains lots of pics of the grounds. We're trying to drum up about $10,000 for repairs to the grounds, which will include finishing up the top two stories of the house, and turning the bottom floors into a mess hall and dormitory for the kids. Bébé's longterm goal for the organization is to hire more in-house teachers who can supplement the kid's learning in school, teach them practical trades like sewing, cooking, auto maintenance and such, and who can mentor the kids. We'd like to be able to accommodate these new hires on the top floors of the house, and move the kids into the lower floors. Also, they'd serve as private rooms for any volunteers we have on the property.

School

Here are some pics demonstrating what schooling is like for some of the Longchamp Charities kids. Although the kids were on holiday when I arrived, they were still studying ahead: getting a head start of next trimester's lessons. The girls featured in this set are all at the top of their class, and were rewarded with a special overnight trip to Cavaillon right before Christmas.

Cavaillon!

On December 22, we took a trip to a beautiful town called Cavaillon, 4 hours north-east of Port-au-Prince. OMG we were 15 in an SUV for 4 hours, it was ridiculous. Seven of the girls were packed in the back of the car, one girl was sitting on my lap in the front passenger's seat. Halfway through the trip, she vomited all over me, totally squashing any urges to procreate that I might have previously harbored. We stayed at the town judge's house, who also owns the town radio station and rec center. This trip was special, because two of the girls, Arnilde and Christhilde, are from there, and they got to see their family for the first time in three years. The girls' family, who were so proud of their daughters, and happy to know they have been taken care of under Bébé's supervision, gave us loads of peanut butter, sugar cane, chickens, and a turkey to take home with us. This was a very warm gesture. However, spending 4 hours in a cramped SUV with 2 live chickens, a screaming turkey, and 11 sugar cane sucking kids was kind of the last thing I wanted to do.

Bébé's Kids!

Finally, here are some great shots of the kids. Believe me, they're an amazing bunch of little people: fun-loving, happy, and inquisitive. Just like any kids. It was a lot of fun to spend my holiday with them, and I felt honored by their welcome.

BTW, if any of these pics have stirred the philanthropic bone in your body, feel free to support us by donating via PayPal here. What's beautiful about this organization, is that it's not one that hinges on your pity: these kids are being given a chance to make it, and also, equally importantly, they're given a chance to just be kids. They're doing such great work out there: let's hope they can continue it!

o noes its teh singularity

1206071415.jpg
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

o noes its teh singularity

More Screenshots

Got a skype call from Sean, one of my best friends who has, like the majority of them, moved to China.

In this sequence, Sean is explaining the 5 greatest Roman emperors.

So I figured out what's wrong with me

For as long as I can remember, I have always been preoccupied with what I believe is, the insignificant minutiae of language. To be precise, I'm talking about letters: singularly, or in combination, either spoken or written. For instance, I have always ascribed gender to each letter in the alphabet. A is a lady, kind of young, very pretty and extremely friendly and helpful. R, on the other hand, is a real ice queen; she castrates men, especially S, who I always regarded as her loyal yet hen-pecked boyfriend.

Then, there's the combination on letters, which spurs a bit more emotion in me. I'm incredibly sensitive to the sounds of certain syllables. Like, the song "Ay Bay Bay" by Hurricane Chris really really rubs me the wrong way. I can't stand the cadence of that combination of syllables as he raps them. It conjures up an emotion in me that's kinda akin to being caught masturbating, or something equally as mortifying.

I always thought that there was something seriously wrong with me. Like, some sort of cognitive disorder that was probably harming my ability to understand language like other people. But, I was intrigued by the theory of it, and wanted to get to the root of this behavior. I totally just read that I'm a Synesthete, and my particular brand of synesthesia is called "Ordinal linguistic personification". According to the Great Wiki, I have the tendency to associate ordered sequences with personallities. Apparently, 1 out of 23 people constantly and involuntarily is prone to synesthetic associations, and its prevalent in a lot of history's most prolific artists.

I haven't felt this special in a very long while (!) and I can feel some new project on the horizon that will explore this in greater depth. What's interesting about this tendency, I feel, is the many ways synesthesia can manifest itself in any individual, and how deeply your associations are steeped in your own personal mythology.

More on this to come! I'm going to do some reading!

Betta Splendens (2)

It's COMING!

Betta Splendens

So, here in Somerville, I joined up with Dorkbot:Boston. Dorkbot here is a much much much smaller crowd, which is really comforting. We're working on a group installation for Halloween: we have lots of space at this Burrito joint by the Davis Square T stop.


My project is called Betta Splendens: it's basically a haunted fish tank inhabited by a ghost fish who doesn't like it one bit when you tap the glass! I'm currently working on the project now, and have bought a beautiful betta fish to star in my project. She's so photogenic!






Here's my technologically-thick and verbose write-up for the project. You know, grad schools are going to have to read about this, too...

An Enrico Gifford

At Eric's last-day-at-DESCO party at the Pint, Number #1 (Gelsinger) was guilt-tripped into giving Eric a massage. I made a gifford.

NYC --> BOS

So, I'm moving to Boston. (Well, Somerville, actually.) Moving is quite the stress-inducer, so I haven't been blogging or making things; I have new favorite activities now, like packing, stressing about cash, and generally making my friends' and family's lives miserable. These activities are so much more bomb than the dreaming and scheming that normally fill up my days.


Anyway, in order to get back to the dreaming and scheming, I've started a video/image/hypertext-y diary. I assume, of course, that no one actually cares what I do, but just in case, here's a link to the first entry. More will be coming on a semi-regular basis.



...and off I go...

The Astroboy Series

So, these are some unprocessed pics from a series I'm making. So, um, they're pictures from the TV show Astroboy...
...Taken while I was watching the TV show Astroboy...
...at 2 AM on Saturday night...





















I have so many pics of this up on the flickr, if you're interested...

The Office WebCam Screenshot of the Day

Today's game: high contrast/low contrast!





I now have a flickr set dedicated to this very series. Just so you know...

A bad photographer :(

To compensate for my rotten foto skills, I've started to take pictures of pictures. These are from the pre-flight safety video shown on my flight to Miami.

web cam

they put a webcam on my system at work. so what am i doing? taking screenshots of myself.

Andrew Brandou scared the hell out of me!

I need a vacation very badly. I think I'd like to take a "stay-cation" and sit in my house and just blog. I've got so much to blog about, but very little time.

This is old news, but the creepiest thing I've seen in a long time is this series of paintings by Andrew Brandou about the People's Temple murder/suicides in Jonestown.



(This one is my favorite.)

Turns out, Brandou's entire body of work consists almost exclusively of works inspired by creep, violent, cultish phenomena, including works inspired by the Manson murders. I really want to buy this:



It's a toy he's having manufactured of a recurring motif in his works, the sniper bunny. He's just so adorably creepy. Also, please understand, dear reader, that the aesthetic from those old Golden Books from the 50s, 60s, and 70s used to populate my nightmares as a child.

They're all doing things

All of my friends are doing sparkly, spangly, wonderful things. Noah, who runs circles around the majority of people I know, hooked up these big foam Hulk hands to his computer sequencer via a CUI board. Create Digital Music caught wind of the project (due to his effusive flickr documentation of the whole project --- what a gift for self-promotion he has...) and posted about it on the blog. This is pretty neat, and you can look at it here. Noah is wearing his bee shirt.

Carlen, who is a big, beautiful baby, finally found some awesome people to collaborate with. (In which case, "collaborate" means taking the back seat to Carlen's genius, so I guess I mean she's found people to produce her...) She's doing a small, 3-minute video-blog show thingie that's very well produced by some kid from NYU. This link is here. Also, if you've never seen Carlen's half-hillarious, half-creepyasfuck blog, it's worth a visit: http://carlenaltman.blogspot.com/index.html